Eric Lichtblau is down with the New Order. If there's any genuine news value in the Justice Department news conference yesterday that hyped a declassified summary of the government's non-case against José Padilla—much less any genuine front-page news value—I confess I'm unable to see it. Yet it's not just the Times: both the Washington Post and the LA Times give the story A1 play, and Knight-Ridder gives it the off-lead position on their Washington Bureau site. Granted, what's involved here is a pioneering addition to the arsenal of law enforcement on John Ashcroft's part: but what can we learn about PR-driven document declassification that we didn't already know from the Pastor General's performance before the 9/11 commission?

Compare-and-contrast is always a useful exercise, and in this case it demonstrates that nobody works harder shilling for the DoJ than the Times' Eric Lichtblau. Given the shared editorial cravenness that lands this trial-by-press-conference on all those front pages, there's obviously a narrow limit to permissible skepticism here, but most reports manage to convey less than wholehearted endorsement of the DoJ position. The other article leads are fairly dry—the WaPo's first sentence notes the document release as "unusual," code for "of suspect motivation"—but Lichtblau works so hard to pump air into the occasion, after three grafs he's practically in need of a shower:

Just weeks before the Supreme Court is to decide whether the Bush administration improperly declared Jose Padilla an enemy combatant, the Justice Department on Tuesday released newly declassified documents that it said showed the grave terrorist threat he posed to the United States.

Officials disclosed for the first time that Mr. Padilla, a former Chicago gang member accused of becoming an operative for Al Qaeda, had cooperated extensively with American interrogators after his capture in May 2002. While the broad outline of the accusations against Mr. Padilla has been known for two years, the declassified documents provided new details about plots to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb" or blow up an apartment building, perhaps in New York City.

"We now know much of what Jose Padilla knows, and what we have learned confirms that the president of the United States made that right call and that that call saved lives," James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, said in releasing the declassified documents.

[Of the articles in this set, by the way, only Knight-Ridder's has the decency to mention in its lead that Padilla is an American citizen who has been imprisoned without charges for two years now.] No one else offers Comey's triumphal quote, or especially gives his statements more than the minimum of coverage. Lichtblau, on the other hand, is all over the guy, and never lets go throughout the piece.

Skepticism, in the form of a litotes, tinges the graf in which the WaPo's Dan Eggen explains what doesn't provide an occasion for the press conference:

The release of information yesterday was not related to the Supreme Court case, Comey said, but was in response to a request for information from Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Nor did yesterday's news conference come in response to criticism last week that new warnings of a heightened terrorist threat were vague and unsubstantiated by new information, he said.

Intended by Mr. Eggen as dry humor, I don't doubt. But Lichtblau, again, works hard at maintaining the maximum of credulity, and seems to endorse the notion that the DoJ is just doing its best to try to work its way out of a "conundrum":

Mr. Comey said the timing of the release in advance of the Supreme Court decision was coincidental [since of course the timing of the decision couldn't have been anticipated or anything—ed.], and said the Justice Department, the Defense Department and other agencies had been working on the declassification for several months as a way of answering public concerns about the case. "If it had been done sooner, it would have been released sooner," he said.

The Bush administration has endured criticism for months for declaring Mr. Padilla an enemy combatant in 2002 and jailing him in a military brig in South Carolina with only scant public disclosure of what he was accused of doing.

While defending the enemy combatant policy, Mr. Comey acknowledged the public relations conundrum that the case represented. "Every place I went to speak," he said, "people would say, 'We agree with the war on terror, but we've got a problem with this Padilla thing. I wish we knew more about it.'"

Darn critics! Some folks just won't be pleased, no matter what you do. Only Lichtblau finds Comey's aw-shucks antics quote-worthy or (apparently) persuasive.

Comey also gets the last word in Lichtblau's piece, and as is often the case that's where the writer clues you in to the attitude you're to come away from the story with. Accordingly, we have to guess that Eric is of one mind with our Republican Torquemadas in thinking that the TerraWar does, indeed, change everything—such as niggling interest in civil rights. Lichtblau's final two grafs:

Mr. Comey said that had the Bush administration brought criminal charges against Mr. Padilla in the beginning, rather than jailing him as an enemy combatant, it might never have found out about his plotting.

"He would very likely have followed his lawyer's advice and said nothing, which would have been his constitutional right," Mr. Comey said. "He would likely have ended up a free man, with our only hope being to try to follow him 24 hours a day, seven days a week and hope - pray really - that we didn't lose him."

[Gosh, he's right! The Justice Department isn't set up to maintain surveillance on people!] But compare the curt conclusion of Ken Moritsugu's article for Knight-Ridder, where Mr. Comey comes off in a slightly more ominous light:

The government maintains that Padilla needs to be detained to protect Americans. There are no immediate plans to release or try him.

"We'll figure out down the road what we do with Jose Padilla," Comey said.

posted by michael  4:47:57 PM  
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Still carrying Chalabi's water. Media Views, at FAIR, has the goods on Judith Miller's astonishing resurrection today ("Former Oil-for-Food Director Criticizes Security Council"), Judy once again stoutly seeing no evil on the subject of Ahmed Chalabi. (After this last week, how does anybody at the Times allow Judith Miller anywhere near a Chalabi-related story?) The occasion for Miller's article (written with Warren Hoge) is an email self-defense from Benon V. Sevan, former executive director of the UN's oil-for-food program, that an unnamed recipient passed along to the Times.

The e-mail message to what one United Nations official called Mr. Sevan's "inner circle" is his first comment on the allegations of corruption and cover-up that have damaged the United Nations at a time when it is grappling to shape an interim government in Iraq scheduled to take power on June 30, and to assist the country in planning elections and drawing up a constitution.

In his e-mail message, Mr. Sevan said he was the victim of an "intense smear campaign."

[Silly me, after the events of the last few days I didn't realize that the UN was still on the spot for forming an interim Iraqi government: the IGC seems to have taken that job in hand.] As it happens, that "intense smear campaign" was likely orchestrated by none other than Ahmed Chalabi, who in addition to being an all-around con man and Iranian spy is a blackmailer, enabled in that role by the U.S., which allowed Chalabi and his thugs to help themselves to a treasure trove of Mukhabarat and Baath party secret files. Judy's having none of that, though: as far as she's concerned, Ahmed's hands are clean, and she "reports" the story without mentioning any of that detail, credulously limiting discussion to an INC spokesman's pious denials.

He said Mr. Chalabi had not been happy when an Arab newspaper listed Mr. Sevan's name along with others for alleged special oil allotments under the program. "The publishing of such names complicated the inquiry," Mr. Qanbar said.

Unfortunately for Judy, that same spokesman didn't seem at all displeased at the publishing of names when the story first broke—probably since they were published at Chalabi's behest. Read the FAIR research catching Miller out, and wonder what the hell is going on inside the Times that lets a thing like this see print now.

Update: OK, after getting over my initial shock and thinking about it for two minutes, there's only one conclusion I can draw here. What else can Miller's byline on this story be, but another Bill Keller fuck-you to the paper's critics? Last week's Editor's Note promised "aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight": I guess we know now where Keller's aggression is really directed. The brief era of self-examination at the New York Times is officially over.

posted by michael  1:20:15 PM  
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